Ancient Evening: Updike, Mailer and Sontag Read for Other Old People

Queens College, Flushing. John Updike is doing some kind of dance with his left leg. It pauses behind the lectern before flicking out and stretching and dissociating itself from the rest of his body. The leg keeps doing its own thing as he reads a couple of stories. At first his voice is staticky, sort of stewy, through the microphone.

"What he liked about her was her liveliness in bed," he reads to a couple of laughs. It's a story, like most of his, about the difference between first and second wives. Then another: "This one is based on the story of Pygmalion. You are?"?he looks out at us?"?of course familiar with the myth, or you wouldn't be here." The audience murmurs appreciatively. Then he reads a little poem about how nice it is to get applause, which gets a bunch of applause. Updike, who was always charming, is even better like this, older and avuncular.

We're at Queens College Evening Readings' 25th anniversary: Updike, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag are duly giving their blessings in half-hour allotments. But when Mailer, now in his late 70s, scrapes up onto the stage with a cane in each hand and pauses with his fantastic blue eyes (there's still a boom in his voice), he tells us he wants to talk about something "heavy." He's already thanked Updike for trading places with him (40 years ago such ecumenicism on Mailer's part toward Updike, to whom he reportedly once recommended a hooker to loosen him up, would have been unthinkable), and he wants to get going. What he wants to talk about, he tells us, is death.

These are nice people?likable upper-middlebrow season-ticket holders and retirees with an interest in the arts, in their 60s and beyond. So they really don't want to hear about death, not in the form of a poem about wanting to be an executioner. And when Mailer continues by reading from a monologue of a dead Egyptian describing the feeling of being embalmed, the audience has its mouths half-open. And he drones on and on and on and on...and there are fluids draining and organs pickling and delicate bits of cartilage disintegrating into fibers...

Everyone's relieved when Sontag finally gets up, ready to read from her latest novel. She's got shiny new black hair and she's vigorous?does all the voices, swoops her arms, acts along with her protagonist, a Polish actress practicing Hamlet with a cohort. They're doing the Yorick bit, and no one can find Yorick's skull. "What did I do with that skull? A prop, a prop. My kingdom for a prop! My last line would have gone so much more resoundingly if I could have brandished a skull."

Three mellowed icons, doing a sort of dinner theater or Learning Annex workshop.

Sontag continues to read: "Except Death... What better audience could a crushed tragedian have?" Which makes me think of Mailer. And then it's a slow shuffle back to the front of the building. Two cars wait. Sontag and Mailer get in, their handlers beside them. Then the cars circle the statue and drive out the gates. Updike got his own ride home.